Otterday! And Open Thread

Our Open Thread this weekend is hosted by this happy otter. And a carrot.

Today in history: Samuel Morse sent the code message “What hath God wrought”, Amy Johnson became the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, the first Eurovision Song Contest was held, Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia, Temba Tsheri became the youngest person to climb Mt Everest, Queen Victoria, George Lakoff, and Helen Taussig were born, and Copernicus and Duke Ellington died.

Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?

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You’re all a quiet lot today. I was out enjoying the sun for a while, and then helping a neighbour set up her first iPad, which has been rather interesting* because they’re not in any way at all a computer-literate family. Still, we’ll get there.
*in the curse sense

I’m not paying attention to much outside of work or Tamriel at the moment. Next week I will be travelling for work, the first of three such occasions in the next six weeks, and I will be away for Mr angharad’s birthday 😦

Spent 4 1/2 days in hospital this week and now have an avalanche of uni work to be done (papers and thesis). Also trying to come up with a professional placement for my course that will be suitable for me with my chronic illness. Sometimes it is all too much and I wonder why I am doing this course. No one is making me of course, but I feel so defeated sometimes (usually when I am unwell). I start to wonder who is ever going to employ me when I have an unpredictable chronic illness that means I never know when I will be able to work or not. It just depresses me at times and this is one of those times. All the discussion about disability and the DSP etc also gets me down as did a thread on a blog I read (that is written by a disabled woman) where a commenter told her she (the blogger) shouldn’t have had her last two children because she knew there was a chance they too would have the same disability as the blogger and be a ‘drain’ and ‘burden’ on the country and other tax payers. It’s just been a crap week really.

Re: latest mass shootings in the US I thought Michael Moores response was spot onhttps://m.facebook.com/mmflint/posts/10152065762191857
Nothing is going to change – if anything could change Columbine would have been sufficient. There’ll be another big mass shooting before long. The smaller ones of 3-4 people deaths get little to no coverage here but they’re basically a monthly event. Unfortunately the US is just a shiny of example to the rest of the world of what not to do.

Yeah, no I’m going to have to disagree with you there Chris. I think there are more things he could have said.
He could have left out the mentally ill bit. Mentally ill does not equal entitled white dude who thinks that a particular woman or group of women owe him sex. He was an arsehole. Calling him mentally ill pretends that it was a special case and we are not surrounded by arseholes who think the same. Twitter is full of arseholes blaming the girls for not sleeping with him.
He could have gone more into the gendered nature of the violence and the toxic masculinity that underlines it. The toxic masculinity that underlines gun culture. The idea that somehow if beautiful women took one for the team and slept with all these losers then they wouldn’t take guns and shoot people. Fuck that. How about these losers take a good look at themselves and what they think they are entitled to and shove it up their arses? They will always find some excuse. That beautiful girl is cheating (regardless of what she actually does), he didn’t get the job/payrise/whatthefuckever he deserved. There will always be angry white dudes with a gun and an excuse and all this does is give them another excuse because people/the government should do something and they haven’t.
Sure the US has terrible gun laws. But this is about more than guns so fixing the gun laws still isn’t going to fix this problem.

He could have gone more into the gendered nature of the violence and the toxic masculinity that underlines it.

Well for quite a short statement I thought he did mention that eg:

Why us? What is it about US?” Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males. None of them are committed by the majority gender, women.

Sure the US has terrible gun laws. But this is about more than guns so fixing the gun laws still isn’t going to fix this problem.

There’s definitely more to this than just gun laws – after all the first 3 people he murdered he used a knife and I’m not sure if he killed anyone with his car, but he ran over several people too. But fundamentally guns just make it a whole lot easier to commit mass murder and he obtained them all legally.
Anyway I guess what I mostly agreeing with about his statement is the expression that this is the norm for the US. There’ll be some public outrage for a while, it will die down and then the cycle will start again with another mass murder. Nothing will change. There is simply insufficient will and too much fear in the population for any meaningful change to occur.
Gun control wont stop multiple murders (it hasn’t in Australia) – but it can reduce the severity of the damage when it does occur. Sure you can also point to a whole bunch of fundamental culture problems around self-entitlement etc, but there’s even less chance of that changing in the short to medium term than gun laws changing in the US. How do you stop someone who wants to kill a bunch of people and doesn’t care if they die?

Like most people here, I guess, I’ve spent a lot of the last two days reading about the Isla Vista murders. We’ve had a troll infestation over at WHTM, surprise, not.
In lighter stuff happening here, I’ve started a massive jacket from this pattern. I’ve nearly finished the frill, which is massive – 682 rows, over 12 feet long! I’m using a different yarn – Panda Twista. My computer makes this pic look very blue, but the colours are shades of rust, grey and crimson, all going from very dark to very light.
For the first time in ages, Mr K and I have done a bit of channelling. He’s written (dictated, rather) the first chapter of our Chicago trip.
I have to photoshop my gf’s face into American Gothic. She pulled the best sour expression for it. 😀

I was wondering if anyone might be able to help me out in terms of resources/links/stats for the claim that women who get drunk at clubs etc. and then claim the person they slept with raped them. I have had far too many conversations come up lately about victim blaming and how it goes too far, and the scenario they ALWAYS come up with is the drunk-girl-out-alone who really could have prevented her rape by being more careful story. Does anyone know of any stats as to how often rapes actually occur in this scenario?

Jo, the NSW Rape Crisis Centre might be a good place to start. They’ve got some good info sheets etc. Sounds like you want something more detailed but they have some footnotes that might lead somewhere.